What is the difference in camera memory cards?

About Six months ago after much research, I decided to purchase a quadcopter drone. It is a DJI Phantom 3 Pro drone. This model came with everything ready to go. It even came with a 16 GB memory card for the camera and video part of it. I am planning on taking my drone with me to Iceland in June so I decided to stock up on memory cards for the trip.

Well in trying to choose the right memory card, it turned out to be a challenge and a learning experience. I found out that you can’t just purchase any memory card. The card for my particular drone had to have the ability to write to the card fast enough for capturing video at 4K video stream. That is when I had to learn what all those numbers and symbols meant on the SD memory cards. I did learn some new terminology along the way which curbed a bit of my fear with all those numbers on the face of the cards. This was not the first time I had purchased sd memory cards, I have two Nikon DSLR cameras which one of them does video as well. I also have a GoPro camera too. But never had to do that much understanding to know what card is capable of what speeds for writing to them.

So in my quest to understand all the numbers and symbols I come across a couple articles that will help understand. For example

SD stands for Secure Digital. They have a small lock on them which prevents the data from being erased mistakenly. SD, SDHC and SDXC are various types of SD (Secure Digital) format, that has been released in that order by the SD Association.

If you are interested in learning more you can click on this link to take you to a brief explanation of the cards. Click here

I have also included another link here for more information on doing the math for calculating card speeds. Click here

I have not talked about the quality of each brand as some of the speed ratings on certain brands could be deceiving but my research suggests staying with Sandisk and Lexar brand being fairly safe. Some people may disagree but that is ok. Regardless, always check the device whether camera, drone or whatever you are purchasing memory cards for to know the suggested brands for optimum operation.

So that is everything you need to know—for now—about the memory cards that you use every day. A couple of minor notes: SD cards are easier to lose, especially microSD cards, so get yourself a memory card wallet to hold your cards.